What’s interesting about this anyway?

Well it turns out that (thankfully) there is quite a lot that is interesting! September saw us host our Industrial partners at the University of Bath for a kick-off session to help shape the programme.

Two questions were posed, the first around expectations or current pain points, and what our partners were hoping to get out of the project.  There was a huge range of responses, such as:

  • Moving away from phase-gate – stage-gate often too late
  • Formalising the dynamic design process (awareness)
  • Making sense of the ‘fog of war’
  • Monitoring team collaboration/divergence – ‘alignment of activities’
  • Is there a ‘stable design’ anymore?
  • Knowledge modelling – re-use of knowledge/information

We then introduced the concept of’signatures’ of engineering projects.  We think signatures:

  • Describe or reveal how the data set is evolving
  • Represent a meaningful relationship/characteristic between one or more properties of the objects in the data set
  • Represent a point in time, or an aggregation of traces over a period, e.g. for an activity or phase
  • May embody understanding, or allow insights to be generated, or some action taken

It was a hugely productive session. The outputs will help shape not just our preliminary work but the whole programme, and we’ll be revisiting them often!

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